[Tutor] newbie search and replace

[Magnus Lycka]

At 21:12 2003-01-27 +0100, Gregor Lingl wrote:
>>addrN.replace('LN', 'Lane')
>The readlines() method outputs a list of strings, whereas replace() is a 
>string-method.
>If you used addr.read() instead, which reads in the content of the file as 
>a string, the
>replace()-method should work.

But beware! Remember that ALL occurences of LN etc will be
replaced. And it's case sensitive.

 >>> "First Liston St".replace('st', 'street')
'Firstreet Listreeton St'

Oops!

Regular expressions might be a better choice.

 >>> import re
 >>> stPat = re.compile(r'\bst\b', re.IGNORECASE)
 >>> stPat.sub('Street', "First Liston St")
'First Liston Street'

But to use re well, you need some study and practice. See
the python library reference.


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Magnus Lycka, Thinkware AB
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